Jagex invests millions to curb RuneScape DDoS attacks

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'This is a growing plague within the industry that many online services struggle with, and RuneScape appears to be one of the biggest targets,' says CEO Mark Gerhard

Jagex has made a multi-million pound investment in its flagship MMO RuneScape in an effort to halt DDoS attacks disrupting its servers.

The title has suffered from such distributed denial of service attacks for over a year, but the company said it has recently experienced a sharp increase from such actions. This has casued players to disconnect from servers and prolonged lag.

Jagex CEO Mark Gerhard said this was likely down to the removal of private servers and its efforts to curb booting and gold farming.

As a result, the studio has made a multi-million pound investment into its global IT infrastructure as it attempts to deal with continued attacks.

The developer is also working with security providers to eradicate the issue and to take legal action against those responsible.

Gerhard has also assured players that no personal information has been obtained as a result of such attacks.

"This is - unfortunately - a growing plague within the industry that many online services struggle with, and RuneScape appears to be one of the biggest targets," said Gerhard.

"Motives for launching these attacks seem to vary, but the end result is the same. The sharp increase in attacks does tie closely with removal of private servers, bots and gold farming, so it would follow that this is in revenge for destroying their businesses. This has also resulted in an increase in immature users at malicious forums like 'buga buse' DDoSing and stealing from many individual players, taking credit for RuneScape service outages.

"I wanted to take this opportunity to assure you that we have, are and will continue to work tirelessly, preventing as many of these attacks from affecting your gameplay as we can. We have recently made a multi-million pound investment in our global IT infrastructure to deal with the continued attacks and are working with a number of service and security providers to eradicate the issue completely. We are also working closely with worldwide law enforcement agencies to bring the people responsible for these attacks to justice."

As part of attempts to halt DDoS attacks, Jagex has asked any users with information on the matter to contact them at tipoff@jagex.com.